An approach to Goteo

Goteo is a platform for crowdfunding or collective financing (monetary contributions) and distributed collaboration (services, infrastructures, microtasks) for projects which, apart from giving individual rewards, also generate a collective return through fomenting the commons, open code and/or free knowledge. As a member of the network you can have one or various roles: presenting a project, cofunding or collaborating on one.

You can read more information about our motivations here. and if you need to clarify any of the the concepts we mention, you can check out our glossary.

Crowdfunding is a form of cooperation between a lot of people to gather a sum of money to help in the development of a specific project.

Goteo is a new way, based on this model, to stimulate collaborative projects of an open and/or free nature. As an alternative or complement to financing from public administrations or private companies, Goteo reactivates the co-responsable role of civil society.

Goteo provides an opportunity for individuals and small organisations with non-generalist projects and with difficulties in accessing resources to get help to begin projects which will later be sustainable and durable.

These are the points that differentiate Goteo from other crowdfunding platforms:

Commons, open and free: we promote projects working for the commons, open code and/or free knowledge, putting the accent on the public mission and favouring free culture and social development.

Free and/or open licences:: projects that wish to be cofunded with the help of Goteo must permit, through the use of licences, the copying, public communication, distribution, modification and/or use of part or all of each creation.

Collective return: Goteo seeks the social return of investments and for this reason apart from individual returns, the system is based on collective returns for the development of the commons.

Social investment market: We manage a feeder capital (capital riego) with contributions prom public and private institutions and businesses for co-responsible investment with a multiplying effect in projects that rely on the support of civil society.

Distributed collaboration: In Goteo, apart from monetary contributions, it is possible to collaborate through services, material resources, infrastructure or by participating in specific microtasks needed for the development of projects.

Two crowdfunding rounds of 40+40 days: There are two cofunding rounds, each with a duration of 40 days. The first is an "all or nothing" round for the minimum essential budget, while the second is for an optimum sum to carry out additional improvements.

Community of local nodes: Goteo is a community of communities, a network of local, independent, inter-coordinated nodes which serve to localise the digital, contextualising it.

Goteo was founded by Platoniq and is governed by the transparent and responsible fulfilment of its mission through the Open Sources Foundation, a non-profit organisation which unites all the agents committed to the development of the project, and which is in charge of managing a public-private social investment fund of "feeder capital".

Goteo has an important network of support, composed by diverse agents and geographically distributed, which has accompanied us since the very first steps of the project. Agents related to the commons, free software, cultural innovation or digital activism. But there's never enough of them! So, if you want to join us, get in touch with us.

Obviously, we take our own medicine ;-) We have developed the platform from scratch in PHP. It's new code so it needed to be structured and well tested before being released, making it available progressively. Nowadays a first version has been released under an AGPL3 license. At some point we may launch a campaign about it where it will be possible to contribute with money or tasks. We're counting on everybody who has been asking about the code from day 1 of Goteo to help and improve the platform. There's still a lot to do.